Collegiate Times

Acclaimed environmental scholar Robert Bullard will speak at Tech today at 4 p.m. in Engel 223. Bullard will speak on "Race, Place and Environmental Justice after Hurricane Katrina: Struggles to Reclaim, Rebuild and Revitalize New Orleans and the Gulf Coast" which is the focus of his new book due to come out February 2009 from Perseus Books Group.

Q: What is going to be the focus of your talk?

A: "It's basically, the book is looking at the rebuilding, recovery, and revitalization of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast post-Katrina."

Q: Are you making suggestions for improvements or just studying the effects of it?

A: "What we are looking at is, examining some of the environmental, economic and sociable issues that existed before the storm, pre-Katrina, and examining any lessons that have been learned over the past three or four decades in addressing vulnerable population after natural and man-made disasters. And so the focus is mainly race and class dynamics in the allocation of resources in terms of how insurance settlements are made, what areas are slated for rebuilding and how the recovery and cleaning, in terms of the geography, spatial locations, and race. And particularly looking at the fact that Hurricane Katrina was considered one of the worst environmental hazards -- (a) catastrophe -- in the country. And, in particular, when you talk about the destruction of houses and the flooding of 80 percent of the city, and the contamination that was left from receding flood waters and contaminating sediments, and examining what happened after the storm, but also putting in context what were some of the environmental problems and environmental justice problems were before Katrina that we had been working on the for the last 25 years. ... So, it's looking at how race, class, factors, figure in to rebuilding the city of New Orleans as well as rebuilding the Gulf Coast, how investments are made and how they are skewed oftentimes.

Q: And have you made any conclusions from all the data you have been researching and analyzing about some of the differentiations some of these, like you said, these sort of middle-class people who had all of the available amenities and the lower classes that did not?

A: "Yeah, as a matter of fact we did a major report for the Russell Sage Foundation called 'In the wake of the storm, race, environment and disaster after Katrina,' and we had some preliminary findings from that report, and what we did is expand that study to look at not only the environment in terms of the physical environment but also to look at how resources are being allocated in terms of what the differential and disparate allocations of funds means for the ability of people of color and, in this case, we are talking mostly about African Americans and Vietnamese and Latinos to return. And one major conclusion, which was a major finding in our study before the storm, is that race and vulnerability go hand in hand.

And that there's still a racial dynamic playing a part in terms of which communities get services, which communities were left behind and which communities are provided resources to recover, and this is true before the storm, in terms of which communities did not have access to good public transportation for putting people to get to jobs. A third of black people in New Orleans don't have cars so the people who are left behind in New Orleans, before the storm, in terms of behind in where jobs have moved to, and where economic development is occurring, is away from many African American communities. The spatial mismatch is real. These are the same people who were left behind in the disaster. So when you combine that kind of analysis to talk about the continuing of building on vulnerability and not addressing some of the legacy issues of the communities that were threatened environments before the storm, these are the same communities that are struggling to come back clean, green healthy."

Q: To me this is sort of remarkable because 2005 was Katrina, and seems as if the community has had a lot of time, or at least a lot of opportunity to ameliorate this situation, and are you finding that it is getting better, it is getting worse, is it remaining stagnant, or what?

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